Call of Duty virals poke fun at political powers
| by: | Feb 1, 2008 |
Whereas optimists envision a world where the nations' leaders sit down to negotiate peaceful solutions, DDB, LA has created one where they kick back and play a rousing came of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.
The cheeky virals take five notorious leaders - Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Muammar Qaddafi and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - and recast them as gaming pundits, offering reviews of the first-person shooter game.
"The client wanted to communicate that this is the most realistic, most intense, modern warfare game out there," says CCO Mark Monteiro. "Our premise was: if you want to find out who makes the most realistic, intense modern warfare game, ideally you want to hear it from the experts."
And hear it from the experts you do, via quirky dialogue from ACD Miguel Caballero, who voices each leader.
Each viral is made up of stock news footage, as the concept specifically required clips of world leaders speaking to large crowds, spliced with scenes from the video game. Sourcing the footage was a challenging task, according to freelance producer Carole Ferrari, who says that a lot of the news sources, perhaps unfamiliar in dealing with deadline-addled ad agencies, weren't sensitive to time constraints.
"I was battling that for about two months with all the different news organizations," she says. "Then the turnaround time started to get shorter and shorter."
As well as sourcing footage from Getty Images, Associated Press and the ABC News archives, Ferrari found Corbis' Global Search to be invaluable in getting clips from news sources worldwide in the short time frame.
The team sourced about two or three speeches per clip, with some easier to find than others. Putin clips came in droves while Qaddafi proved to be more elusive. When the team found the right clip, ACDs Caballero and Marcus Wesson adapted the copy to fit. "We sold the client on an idea of what we wanted it to be but, of course, we didn't know what kind of news footage clips we were going to get in," says Ferrari.
The news clips provided some scenarios ripe for viral-friendly humor, such as the Ahmadinejad piece, where a clip featuring two soldiers being medaled by the Iranian president is turned into an honor for avoiding being teabagged during battle, a questionable practice among COD4 gamers where "crouch mode" is used to sit on the face of their fallen opponents.
"Secretly we were praying that somebody would complain about it," laughs Monteiro of the campaign, which, as the agency hoped, has already spawned YouTube versions featuring Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
